Interview by Emily Laber-Warren: “Police rely on tips from ordinary people — witnesses, victims and whistleblowers — to investigate 95 percent of crimes. Sometimes, the decision to speak up is easily made, but in other cases, people elect to stay silent, leaving countless infractions unpunished. About half of violent crimes go unreported, according to estimates by the US Department of Justice.
And yet at certain historical moments, such as in the United States in the early 1950s, when fear of communism led to many false reports against individuals working in entertainment and public service, societies can become places where people readily denounce one another — often falsely, or for petty reasons.
Tattling, whistleblowing, snitching, call it what you will: Patrick Bergemann has spent the past 15 years studying the many ways that people tell on one another, examining everything from Afghan villagers’ reports of illegal Taliban activity to informers’ charges of treason in 17th century Russia. In a recent article in the Annual Review of Sociology, he explores the social pressures that influence people’s decisions to expose, or conceal, wrongdoing. The choice to report reflects not just the infraction but a person’s loyalties and whether they expect to receive rewards or retaliation from authorities and peers, says Bergemann, a sociologist at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Judge Thy Neighbor: Denunciations in the Spanish Inquisition, Romanov Russia and Nazi Germany.
Bergemann talked with Knowable Magazine about why and when people report crimes and bad behavior, and how, for repressive governments, encouraging people to rat on neighbors and coworkers can be a potent form of social control…(More)”.
